Hurry sickness

According to statistics, it is becoming increasingly rare in many countries for families to eat together. It seems that people no longer have time to enjoy a meal, let alone buy and prepare the ingredients.  Meanwhile, fast food outlets are proliferating. Further evidence of the effects of the increasing pace of life can be seen on all sides. Motorists drum their fingers impatiently at stop lights. Tempers flare in supermarket queues.

The above are all symptoms of a modern epidemic called “hurry sickness”. The term was coined by a prominent cardiologist, who noticed that all of his heart disease patients had common behavioural characteristics, the most obvious being that they were in a chronic rush. Hurry sickness has been an issue in our culture ever since but the problem is escalating in degree and intensity, leading to rudeness, short-tempered behaviour and even violence, alongside a range of physical ills.

The primary culprit is the increasing prevalence of technology – like e-mail, cell phones, pagers and laptop computers. We can bring work home, into our bedrooms and on our vacations. Time has sped up for so many people, and there is increased pressure to do more in the same number of hours.

Time is being more compressed than ever. In the past, an overnight letter used to be a big deal. Now, if you can’t send an e-mail attachment, there’s something wrong. Because the technology is available to us, there is an irresistible urge to use it.

What about those annoying people, who shout into their cell phones, oblivious to those around them? Self-centred behaviour is related to larger social trends as well as technology. There is a breakdown of the nuclear family, of community, of belonging, and an increased alienation and sense that we’re all disconnected from one another. This breakdown came before the technology but the technology has exacerbated it. Now we connect through this technology and we don’t have face-to-face interaction.

Ironically, as people pull their cell phones out in the most unlikely venues, our personal lives are available on a public level as never before. People are having work meetings and conversations about their spouses and their therapy sessions with complete impunity. Ordinarily we’d never be exposed to this information.

There is more a sense of entitlement now than ever but there is more than civility at stake. This chronic impatience is damaging not only to our social environment but to our physical health. It builds, and then it doesn’t take much to explode. And for those who repress it, it’s equally damaging.

The high-tech revolution and the lifestyle it has spawned have brought with them a rash of serious health problems, including heart attacks, palpitations, depression, anxiety, immune disorders, digestive ills, insomnia and migraines. Human beings are not designed for pro-longed, high-speed activity. When you look at our heart rates, brain-wave patterns – our basic physiology has not evolved to keep pace with the technology – we are hard-wired to be able to handle a ‘fight-flight’ response where the stress ends within five to ten minutes. In our current culture though, we struggle for hours on end.

Even children are not spared the ills of modern-day overload. There’s a hidden epidemic of symptoms like hypertension, migraines and digestive problems among children as young as ten – disorders never before seen in children. Whether these problems result from being swept into the maelstrom of their parents’ lives, or from full loads of extracurricular activities and unprecedented homework requirements – up to five hours a night for some – children are experiencing the same sense of overload, time pressure and demands that their parents experience and they don’t have coping mechanisms to deal with it.

Recovery is possible but there is no quick fix. Many of these stress-related behaviours have become deeply ingrained to the point where people are hardly aware of them. The greatest paradox is that even when people are ready to change their behaviour, they are in a hurry to do so.

The irony is that all the techniques and technology designed to streamline our lives may ultimately be counterproductive. People are finding that all of this multi-tasking, rushing and worrying is not making life intolerable but actually making them less efficient than they could otherwise be.